WildBlue Satellite’s Undocumented & Unmetered Downloads
Some of us are stuck on WildBlue Internet – a Satellite Internet service provider. It has probably the worst customer satisfaction of any moderately large-scale broadband ISP. Imagine paying $79 a month for only 17GB total bandwidth available per each 30 days. And worst of all, the tools they give you to monitor the bandwidth are sorely lacking.
Any power user that goes over the 17GB bandwidth is immediately penalized and shut down to (less than) 56K dial-up speeds until they drop to 70% of allotted usage – and this will generally take 30 days as they measure your bandwidth over a “rolling” 30 day period.
However, we have found one saving grace of WildBlue Internet that we would like to share with you. From our research, WildBlue does not measure ANY bandwidth on the 30th (and 31st) days of any month. So if you are a WildBlue customer, you can download – freely without any metering or penalty – from 12:01 AM on the 30th day of the month until 12:01 AM on the first – a full 24 hours of unmetered bandwidth and 48 hours for 31 day months. If you refresh your bandwidth meter, you will see it is frozen for a full 24 (to 48) hours – depending on if it is a 30 or 31 day month.
This undocumented and unmetered period makes Wildblue a much better deal than the 17GB of bandwidth that they allow. In contrast, their competitor, HughesNet has a documented 3 hour a day period with unlimited downloading. In fact, if you pay for WildBlue’s highest download speed (1.5mb/s peak), you can download approximately 15-20GB on a single free day and 30GB to 40GB when there is a 31st day of a month.
We discovered WildBlue’s undocumented download period through careful monitoring of our own usage over many months where their 30 day “rolling measurement” would never align with ours. We hope this helps make Wildblue’s service more tolerable for their power users and we are glad to share this with our readers. Of course, beware that this policy may change in the future and monitor your usage!
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